The Price of Moving On
by dragonwriter24cmf
Summary: After the Frost Fair, Bill has questions. Surprisingly, the Doctor agrees to give her the answers.


**The Price of Moving On**

Bill stumbled out of the TARDIS, watching the Doctor as he exited behind her.

The Frost Fair had been amazing. The creature had been strangely beautiful, in a prehistoric way. The way the Doctor had arranged for the orphans to be taken care of was perfect.

She had a lot of questions.

The Doctor turned, saw her expression. "Something wrong?" He glanced around. "Looks like the right place, the right day..."

"Yeah, no, it's not that. It's just...I've got some questions. Was wondering if you'd be willing to answer them, or if I ought to save them for later."

The Doctor considered. "I'll answer three questions."

Well, she had a lot more than three, but she knew what the most important ones were. "Back there, you told me you'd moved on. How do you just...move on, from seeing people die? Or from killing them? And don't tell me gain that it's because more people would die. It's not that simple. It can't be. And if it's so easy, why'd you have me decide about that creature, huh?" The decision had been a difficult one, and she knew the faces of Spider and Lord Sheffield would haunt her dreams for a while.

The Doctor's face settled into long lines, a frown twisting his mouth. Still, he didn't look angry. More like he was thinking about something unpleasant. "Those are complicated questions."

"Yeah, well, you're supposed to be my teacher. So teach me. Explain it." She wanted the answers, even if it meant an extra essay from him later.

"Those are very personal questions."

"Oh." She hadn't considered that. "So you're not going to tell me?"

"I didn't say that." He shook his head. "I did promise to teach you, after all..." He shook his head again, then ran a hand through his wild silver hair. "Come on then."

Bill followed as he led her out of the building, wandering down the London streets until they came to a park. The Doctor meandered the paths until he came to a bench, then sat down, dropping into it heavily and resting his forearms on his knees. Bill settled in beside him.

She was surprised when he took a deep breath and started speaking, his tone rushed and sharp like he was afraid he'd lose his nerve if he didn't get the words out fast.

"The thing you have to understand, the very first thing, before I can explain anything else, is that I'm very old. Much older than I look. 2000 years, give or take. And my people, the Time Lords, we live a certain length of time, and then we regenerate. New face, new body, new quirks, all that rubbish. This..." He held up his hands. "This isn't what I originally looked like. It's still me, of course, it's always me, but..."

"But it's a bit different each time. Got it. So...how long have you had this face for?" She studied the careworn face, the silver hair. He looked old, but knowing that meant she couldn't tell for certain if he **was** old. Or - well, he'd just told her he was old, but she didn't know how old this particular face was. She wondered if this form was as old s he looked, or if he'd changed recently.

"A bit. Time's not important. Just needed you to understand that I've changed. Regenerated. It's important to answering your questions."

"Right." She nodded.

"The other thing you need to know...The Doctor, it's my name, and I know that confuses a lot of people, but...I chose this name. It's who I am, everything I choose to be. The Doctor. That's how it works, you know. Choose a name that suits who you are and who you want to be and what you want to do with your life."

"And you chose to be the Doctor."

"Yes." He sighed. "I was fairly young when I took a TARDIS. Wanted to explore the universe, meet every living race out there. Wanted to help people, save lives, make things better, you know. Learn all the secrets of the universe. Doctor stuff. And I tried, but..."

He sighed again, this time a long slow exhalation that seemed to carry the weight of the world with it. "That's the thing I learned, that I had to learn. You can't save everyone. Even if you want to, even if you try your very hardest...you just can't. Everyone has a time and place to die, and it's not always of old age in bed. Sometimes it's an accident, and sometimes it's a mistake, and sometimes it's with a purpose, a reason. Sometimes it's a choice. But...you can't save everyone. And sometimes, you shouldn't even try, because it would only make things worse if you succeeded."

He waved his hands at the people in the park, though she got the feeling it was more of an abstract gesture, meant to include the whole universe. "Everyone here, everyone out there among the stars...they have a time and place to die. And it's not possible, not even right, to interfere with that. Sometimes you can make it easier, make it better, turn an awful passing into a more peaceful one, make a death a little more meaningful, but you can't stop it."

He shuddered, eyes closing. "I didn't want to learn that lesson. Fought it for the longest time. Sometimes I still fight it. But it's...it's an awful thing to have to realize. I...the first time I realized, the first time it really hit home, I...I almost killed myself. Refused to regenerate. I changed my mind, of course, in the end. But...even now, sometimes, I'll find myself trying to save people I know can't be saved. Fighting the inevitable. And it's..."

He broke off, shaking his head. "I had to learn to move on, to accept that. Because I can't survive otherwise. I can't help anyone if I get too wrapped up in the ones I can't save."

Bill swallowed hard. She thought she understood. But somehow, looking at his face, at the pained expression that settled into the lines and creases of his brow and his cheeks, she wasn't sure she really did.

She'd had to get over Spider's death to help the rest of the orphans, get over the henchman's death to save the rest of the people and stop Sheffield. But doing it over and over again...she wasn't sure she could manage that. She wasn't entirely sure he was as all right with it as he claimed, either. There was something haunted and broken in his eyes that suggested that it had taken more of a toll than he wanted her to know.

She'd have to think about it more. And it still left a more important question. "And the killing?"

The Doctor shuddered. His hands clenched together, white-knuckled. "I..."

He stopped. Breathed. Bill watched as he slowly got himself back under control, or at least as much control as he ever bothered with.

He took a few deep breaths, then opened his eyes to look out over the park. "Some time ago, there was a war. A war between my people and a race called the Daleks. Daleks are...their sole purpose is to become the only living race in the galaxy, to conquer all others to survive. And a long time ago, my people clashed with them. And with others. It was called the Time War. The Last Time War."

He seemed to fold in on himself, eyes looking into the distance, into a devastation she couldn't see. "In linear time, it lasted 400 years. But in real time...well, when you've got time machines, it doesn't matter, does it? The Time War spread out over everything, over space and time throughout the universe. Whole planets would be changed, wiped out and brought back and transformed again by the fluctuations in space-time."

Bill swallowed hard. "Earth too?"

"Earth too. You wouldn't know, because you live here, and you don't remember the differences, but there are several points where Earth's history is unstable. Where I've gone back to help repair the timeline, make it steadier, create a few more fixed points to hold it in place."

"Like the Frost Fair."

He nodded. "Like the Frost Fair."

He fell silent, until finally she prodded him. "So, this Time War..."

"It was long. It was brutal. The races that remember it have sworn to prevent it from ever happening again, it was so terrible."

He heaved out a breath. "I didn't want to fight. I didn't want to be involved. Not in that. I tried...I tried so very hard not to be involved. But...people were dying. Worse, they were being wiped out of existence by alterations in the continuum that they had no hope of even comprehending, let alone stopping. I'd save someone, only to have them vanish when another wave of consequences from the Time War wiped them out of existence. And finally, it was too much."

His jaw clenched. "I regenerated, with the help of some friends. I gave up being the Doctor, became a soldier, a warrior. And I was...I was good at it. Very good. That's the thing, you see, about being a Doctor and a traveler. You know more than you should about how to destroy. How to kill. The more you save something, the more you understand how to break it."

Bill swallowed. "What happened?"

"I became the Doctor of War. The Warrior. The Oncoming Storm. I saw things...did things, all to stop the war. I killed...so many. Most of them Daleks, but not always. I burned...worlds. Galaxies. I don't know. I couldn't...I stopped counting early on." He broke off. "And in the end...when I couldn't do it anymore, when I'd had enough...when I finally realized that the violence was never-ending..."

He stopped, voice cracking. Then he shook his head, pushing his silver hair back with hands that shook slightly. "I hated it. It was necessary, or so I told myself, but I hated it. And I hated the Daleks, and the Time Lords, for what they'd done, for what they'd caused, for the destruction they'd started and what they'd made of me. What they'd driven me to do. But I couldn't stand to hate my people, especially not after...so I turned all of it towards the Daleks. I hated the Daleks. Still do."

He stopped. Bill swallowed, trying to get some moisture in her dry throat. "Did the War end?"

He shivered, eyes closing again. "Yes." His expression mirrored the one he'd worn when he said 'yes' to her in the Frost Fair, but where he'd looked stern then, now he looked tortured.

"How?" She had a feeling she didn't really want to know the answer. At the same time, she thought she might need to. Or that he might need to tell her.

"I ended it. I'd had enough. I couldn't endure it any more. So I...I carved the words 'NO MORE' into the walls of the Dalek home-world, and the Capital of my home planet, Gallifrey. Then I went to the forbidden weapons vault, in the heart of the Citadel, and I took a weapon called The Moment. I took it from the city, to a place I lived as a child. And I used it."

Bill blinked. "What did it do?"

"Destroyed most of the Daleks. About 95% of their race. All of them on Gallifrey at least. For a long time, I thought it killed all the Time Lords as well. It didn't, I found that out a while back. Just transferred them to a pocket dimension, sealed them away from this universe in a time locked alternate dimension for a while. But I didn't know that, not when I used it. I thought for...years, at least, that I was the last of the Time Lords."

Something cold settled in Bill's gut, a sort of sick feeling. "How could you..." Genocide was hard enough to imagine, but genocide against his own people?

"They were destroying the universe." The Doctor bit the words out. "And they, the leaders who were in charge, the things they were doing – my people were becoming reviled throughout the known universe for the things they did during that war. Everything good we'd ever done, being eliminated in the wake of a war that was never-ending. And my own people...we had a generation, multiple generations, who'd never known a world without war. Never known a life without war. We were becoming monsters. I couldn't let that happen."

He looked at her, eyes dark with remembered rage and pain and anguish. "Imagine...imagine if World War II had never stopped. If you grew up in a world where everyone was terrified, all the time. Where hundreds of thousands were dying every day, whole countries being wiped out. But it doesn't end, because the population is large enough, productive enough, to sustain even those losses. And then imagine that you're born, given the power and the knowledge to end it all. And you find a way. Something even more powerful than the atomic bomb. Use it, and the war ends. But so do most of the Germans, and the British Isles disappear into their own Bermuda Triangle. What would you do?"

She thought about it. Tried to imagine it. "I don't know."

"That's the point. No one does, not until they have to make the choice. Not until they've lived through the horror of such times."

It sounded...awful. Beyond awful. She tried to picture it, and she couldn't.

She also couldn't think about it any more. She swallowed hard. "So after..."

"After that I got back in my TARDIS. Started traveling again. Went around trying to wipe out the Dalek remnants for a while, them and their allies, entities like Cybermen. Eventually came back to Earth. Found a companion. A friend. Mostly..." He sighed. "Mostly, I tried to remember how to be the Doctor. Tried to find my way back to the person I was, the person I used to be. The pacifist who saved people. I swore off weapons, started calling myself the Doctor again instead of the other names I had."

He looked at her, all the age of the universe in his eyes. "And I made myself a promise. Never again. I swore I would never again make a choice like the one I made on Gallifrey. Especially not for another race. Having that kind of power, making that kind of choice – it's too dangerous. That's the path of the Daleks and the Cybermen and every person or race I've ever opposed. So – never again will I decide the future of a race. Especially not someone elses. Advise, help, guide – I'm willing to do all those things, but never to make the final decision. It's not my place. And I don't want it to be, ever again."

She blinked. "And that's why you had me decide what to do with that creature, the one in the Thames?"

"Yes." He turned back to gaze at the park. "That's why I had you make the decision. Because this is your world, your people. I will serve, willingly, at your request, but decisions like that must be made by the people who will live with the consequences."

"But...we left. And I'm just a...a nobody who works in a canteen and serves chips to college kids!" She felt slightly appalled. "I shouldn't have that sort of power either."

"That isn't precisely true. On either count. You live in Britain, in an England shaped by the consequences of your choice. The fuel the creature made, what advances would have occurred if you'd kept it captive? If the British had access to such power when the Industrial Revolution began, or in the years of the wars? How might it have changed things?"

She hadn't thought of that. "Don't know."

"And that's all right. But it is still a consequence. Things have happened the way they happened because you chose to free the creature in the ice."

"I still think I made the right choice."

"So do I. That wasn't my point."

She could see that. But that left her other argument. "I'm still just – just Bill Potts. Not anyone special."

"Not true. You, Bill Potts, are someone very special indeed. And I know this, because out of seven billion humans in this world, in this time, it was you who caught my attention. I chose you to be my student, to travel through space and time with me, and I do not choose 'just anyone'. And even if I had not chosen you, the fact remains that you were chosen by the pilot of that sentient water. And that marks you as someone unique as well."

Bill shrugged, feeling a bit uncomfortable at the unexpected praise. "Right place, right time, that's all."

He offered her a smile, warm as sunlight in summer. "But what brought you there?"

"Just...chose to be somewhere, and it happened." She blinked as her own words registered. "Oi..."

"Right then." The Doctor stood, brushing off his pants. "Adventure and lesson are over for today I think. Next week, I want an essay on the consequences of choices. Go abstract, but also choose one incident, personal or historical, where different choices might have had different outcomes, and extrapolate those possible outcomes. Be as precise and as realistic as you can, none of this butterfly theory nonsense, everyone's done that. No less than 3000 words." He offered her a smirk, then turned and walked away.

Bill watched him walk away with a huff of exasperation. Trust the Doctor to break off a meaningful discussion with an assignment and snark. Not to mention poking fun at her for the concerns she'd voiced when they first landed at the Frost Fair. It made her want to hit him. Or throw a snowball at him.

Still, she couldn't deny she was the tiniest bit relieved. That had been a far more intense discussion than she'd been prepared for.

She was still thinking about it as she made her way home, then up to her bedroom. Honestly, she'd been prepared for him to brush it off, the way he had at the Frost Fair, with a few clipped phrases and an attempt to refocus her attention on something else. She'd also been prepared for him to give her the absolute minimum as an answer. Something about a long life, and people die. It was the sort of thing she'd always heard older people say.

 _'People die, Bill. You have to learn to move on, keep living.'_ It was something one of her first foster parents had said. She'd thought the Doctor might say something similar.

Not...that. That frank and honest baring of his soul and his past, which she had the impression he normally guarded even more tightly than the vault he'd hidden on the far side of the university.

She wondered why he'd been so honest with her. Because he really wanted to teach her? Because he'd seen how upset she was and wanted to explain, maybe excuse himself?

She rejected the idea of excuses. He wasn't really one to make excuses. Like the Frost Fair. He hadn't expected her to forgive him for the boy's death and his reaction. He hadn't asked her to forgive him. He'd just…

Well, he'd told her what was what, no apologies for who he was or the way he handled things. So...not excuses.

Explanations then.

She flopped on her bed, notepad ready for jotting out the outlines of her newest assignment. She contemplated various historical events to analyze, as well as her own personal choices.

In the end, she found herself with one choice that stood out above the others. The day she'd said yes to being tutored by the Doctor.

What would have happened if she'd said no?

She wouldn't be receiving a wide, varied, and honestly fantastic education in just about every topic on the planet.

She might have been kidnapped by a sentient water-alien. Or not. She might not have met Heather that night. Or she might not have been the type of person the pilot would want to take around the universe.

She wouldn't have gotten to know the Doctor and Nardole. She wouldn't have discovered the vault, with it's mysterious contents.

She wouldn't have a box full of pictures of her Mum. A visual record of a life she'd never before had glimpses of. She'd have been left with her reflection in a mirror, and no answers to any of her questions about what her mother had really been like.

She wouldn't have discovered the truth about the TARDIS, the inside that was bigger than the outside. She wouldn't have gotten to go to Australia, or the ends of the universe, the other end of space and time. She wouldn't have been shown the stars, the future and the past.

She wouldn't have walked the ice of the Last Frost Fair, watched three people die and helped four orphans find a home. Or released a creature older than London itself from a centuries long confinement.

Bill swallowed hard, remembering Spider's cry, his hand sticking out of the ice. The way the henchman had sunk into the ice while screaming.

And that was the question the Doctor had been working towards, wasn't it? Was all the wonder she'd seen worth the death she'd seen? Would she trade seeing the stars for the memory of Heather being absorbed by the pilot-thing? She hadn't when the Doctor had tried to erase her memories, but still…

Was the thrill of adventure worth seeing someone else innocent, someone like Spider, die? Or worse, participating in someone's death?

Could she risk becoming like the Doctor, someone who 'moved on'? Or would she come to the point where she no longer cared, a cold, callous killer like Sheffield?

She paused, thinking of how she'd differentiated between the two in her mind. And what was the difference, really? The Doctor hadn't had a problem dropping Sheffield or his minion into the river.

Snippets of things the Doctor had said came back to her. _'the first lesson I had to learn...you can't save everyone, no matter how hard you try. Everyone has a time and place to die, and you can't stop that. Sometimes you shouldn't...sometimes I still find myself trying to save people I know can't be saved, fighting the inevitable.'_

 _'I couldn't endure it anymore...I carved the words 'NO MORE' into the Dalek home-world and the wall of the capital of my home planet...'_

 _'I tried to remember how to be the Doctor again...the pacifist who saved people.'_

 _'I promised myself I'd never make that choice again. Especially not for another race.'_

And there it was. The Doctor had done things, seen things, been part of awful things. But no matter how he acted or brushed it off with 'I moved on' or justified it with 'others will die if I don't', he regretted it. It was there in his voice, in his expressions and his eyes.

It had been there the whole time he'd answered her questions in the park. And underneath the anger in his eyes when she'd admonished and challenged him at the Frost Fair.

He did what he had to and moved on, but that didn't mean he didn't feel anything. He'd just had more practice at dealing with it, compartmentalizing it while he tried to sort things out, until he had time to think on it.

It was what she'd have to learn if she wanted to keep traveling and studying with him. How to deal with inevitable losses, to look death in the eye and keep going, even if it hurt her later, even if it was tragic and upsetting and all she wanted to do was cry.

Her foster mum had always said there was no such thing as a free lunch. This was apparently part of the price for traveling the universe with the Doctor.

Bill set to work fleshing out her essay, but her mind was on the conclusion, and the question she'd have to answer there.

Was the adventure worth the price?

 ** _Author's Note:_** _I just kind of felt like this was unresolved, and something they'd get back to. I tried to keep it accurate, but apologies if I missed anything._


End file.
